Blue GhostGhost's Blog, page 37

rincewitch:it’s your father’s friendlock. this is the weapon of a livejournalist. not as clumsy or...

rincewitch:

it’s your father’s friendlock. this is the weapon of a livejournalist. not as clumsy or as random as a personal tumblr, but a more elegant weapon for a more civilized age. for years, the livejournalists were the guardians of idiotic blog drama and fandom pornography in the galaxy. before the dark times, before tumblr                    

Last week my mother vacationed in DC and toured the L of C. She...

Last week my mother vacationed in DC and toured the L of C. She brought my book and while it was safely in tow for the tour this is where she was allowed to photograph. OMG, way to make me blush ma!

Photo

womaninthewoods:le petit prince :)

womaninthewoods:

le petit prince :) 

unhaunting:"death of the author" is an analytical tool that emerged in specific circumstances in...

unhaunting:

"death of the author" is an analytical tool that emerged in specific circumstances in history, in response to specific trends in literary theory. it’s a useful tool. that’s all it is. it’s not dogma, it’s not how texts Should be read, and it’s not above criticism.

a feminist criticism in particular would probably be the first to point out that it’s one thing to remove The God-Author, the Father of the Text, and quite another to remove the sort of authors that have been erased from readings and history books for a number of centuries as a matter of course

i just see people misusing these concepts for ostensibly good causes, but where that ends up going is… not good at all

startrekmademequeer:verygaygirlfriendfoxmulder:startrekmademequeer:verygaygirlfriendfoxmulder:...

startrekmademequeer:

verygaygirlfriendfoxmulder:

startrekmademequeer:

verygaygirlfriendfoxmulder:

me just now: i didn’t know jeff goldblum was hot

so you had never heard of jeff goldblum

honestly i thought jeff goldblum was a character in jurassic park??? not an actor

omfg mulder…i love everything about this situation and i’m so excited for this new stage in your life, we should get together and watch independence day okay it’s good shit

Uhhh WTF guys you all need to start with buckaroo banzai, then earth girls are easy and then maybe the fly if you’re into that shit. Don’t sell the hot of goldblum short.

Toad Words

jumpingjacktrash:

the-real-seebs:

ursulavernon:

            Frogs fall out of my mouth when I talk. Toads, too.

            It used to be a problem.

            There was an incident when I was young and cross and fed up parental expectations. My sister, who is the Good One, has gold fall from her lips, and since I could not be her, I had to go a different way.

            So I got frogs. It happens.

            “You’ll grow into it,” the fairy godmother said. “Some curses have cloth-of-gold linings.” She considered this, and her finger drifted to her lower lip, the way it did when she was forgetting things. “Mind you, some curses just grind you down and leave you broken. Some blessings do that too, though. Hmm. What was I saying?”

            I spent a lot of time not talking. I got a slate and wrote things down. It was hard at first, but I hated to drop the frogs in the middle of the road. They got hit by cars, or dried out, miles away from their damp little homes.

            Toads were easier. Toads are tough. After awhile, I learned to feel when a word was a toad and not a frog. I could roll the word around on my tongue and get the flavor before I spoke it. Toad words were drier. Desiccated is a toad word. So is crisp and crisis and obligation. So are elegant and matchstick.

            Frog words were a bit more varied. Murky. Purple. Swinging. Jazz.

I practiced in the field behind the house, speaking words over and over, sending small creatures hopping into the evening.  I learned to speak some words as either toads or frogs. It’s all in the delivery.

            Love is a frog word, if spoken earnestly, and a toad word if spoken sarcastically. Frogs are not good at sarcasm.

            Toads are masters of it.

            I learned one day that the amphibians are going extinct all over the world, that some of them are vanishing. You go to ponds that should be full of frogs and find them silent. There are a hundred things responsible—fungus and pesticides and acid rain.

            When I heard this, I cried “What!?” so loudly that an adult African bullfrog fell from my lips and I had to catch it. It weighed as much as a small cat. I took it to the pet store and spun them a lie in writing about my cousin going off to college and leaving the frog behind.

            I brooded about frogs for weeks after that, and then eventually, I decided to do something about it.

            I cannot fix the things that kill them. It would take an army of fairy godmothers, and mine retired long ago. Now she goes on long cruises and spreads her wings out across the deck chairs.

            But I can make more.

            I had to get a field guide at first. It was a long process. Say a word and catch it, check the field marks. Most words turn to bronze frogs if I am not paying attention.

            Poison arrow frogs make my lips go numb. I can only do a few of those a day. I go through a lot of chapstick.  

            It is a holding action I am fighting, nothing more. I go to vernal pools and whisper sonnets that turn into wood frogs. I say the words squeak and squill and spring peepers skitter away into the trees. They begin singing almost the moment they emerge.

            I read long legal documents to a growing audience of Fowler’s toads, who blink their goggling eyes up at me. (I wish I could do salamanders. I would read Clive Barker novels aloud and seed the streams with efts and hellbenders. I would fly to Mexico and read love poems in another language to restore the axolotl. Alas, it’s frogs and toads and nothing more. We make do.)

            The woods behind my house are full of singing. The neighbors either learn to love it or move away.

            My sister—the one who speaks gold and diamonds—funds my travels. She speaks less than I do, but for me and my amphibian friends, she will vomit rubies and sapphires. I am grateful.

            I am practicing reading modernist revolutionary poetry aloud. My accent is atrocious. Still, a day will come when the Panamanian golden frog will tumble from my lips, and I will catch it and hold it, and whatever word I spoke, I’ll say again and again, until I stand at the center of a sea of yellow skins, and make from my curse at last a cloth of gold.

Terri Windling posted recently about the old fairy tale of frogs falling from a girl’s lips, and I started thinking about what I’d do if that happened to me, and…well…

!.

You know how if you go through years and years of “best science fiction short stories”, every so often you find some short story you’ve never heard of before, but it’s just amazing and brilliant and leaves you wondering why you never read stories with that plot before? This is one of those.

Seriously, wow.

this made me smile.

i’m still smiling.

wonderful

If you could shake my head out it would look kinda like my...

If you could shake my head out it would look kinda like my dresser top

I’ve been thinking about adopting a 2nd dog. And I know, I know this is just an emotional...

I’ve been thinking about adopting a 2nd dog. And I know, I know this is just an emotional response to like the fact that we aren’t moving to NYC this summer and now I have to get some work done and figure out what I am going to do with my life. I’m probably just trying to throw more chaos into the mix so I don’t have to focus on all the scary adult things I should be dealing with right now. It’s actually a little transparent and not super mature. BUT OMG YOU GUYS look at this face. Just look at it.

"What about a modernist mayonnaise presenting itself to a formalist culinary critic’s judgement..."

“What about a modernist mayonnaise presenting itself to a formalist culinary critic’s judgement of taste? He finds it awful but he doesn’t stop with his own judgement. This mayonnaise is put together in such a manner, he says to himself while tasting it, that something of the pure ingredients that go into it are to be found in the final results. It brings off the feat of displaying its composition to me, of taking the ‘conventions of mayonnaise’ for its subject matter, of being a self-referential mayonnaise, a ‘mayonnaise about mayonnaise’, in short, a critique of mayonnaise brought about by means of mayonnaise itself.”

-

Thierry de Duve, Echos of the Readymade: Critique of Pure Modernism

You know switching between reading art theory and gay romance all day sure does start to slide your perspective of reality.